Lead Applied AI engineer

About Fetch

Fetch is how modern pet parents give their pets the best care. One pink app 🩷 for insurance, health and care.

We’ve raised our Series A from Lightspeed and Airtree, we’re rated 4.9⭐️ on Google, #1 by CHOICE, and we’re growing fast.

We think AI is going to fundamentally change how we care for pets.

We have pet health data, an in-house team of vets and vet nurses, and we build our own product and technology. We want to turn that into an intelligence layer that understands each pet deeply – their history, health and what might matter next.

We’re looking for an exceptional Lead Applied AI Engineer to build it.

The role

This is a senior, hands-on builder role.

You’ll lead applied AI at Fetch – setting the direction, choosing the models and approaches, building them yourself, measuring whether they actually work, and shipping them into real products.

Your core job is simple: make Fetch exceptionally good at understanding pet health.

That capability will power everything from helping pet parents care for their pets, to supporting vets, interpreting health records and automating parts of insurance.

We don’t need someone with a particular academic pedigree. We want someone who is obsessed with what modern models can do, moves quickly, experiments constantly and knows how to turn new capabilities into reliable products.

• Location: Sydney, hybrid, 3 days in office

• Employment type: Full time

• Compensation: Series A salary + meaningful equity

• Working with: Co-founders, engineering, product, data, vets and vet nurses. We’re flat, fast and care about the best idea.

What you’ll build and own

• Fetch’s pet health intelligence layer: models and systems that can understand messy, longitudinal pet health information and reason over it

• Model quality end-to-end: datasets, evals, model selection, prompting, retrieval, post-training, fine-tuning, guardrails and monitoring

• A serious evaluation system: clear benchmarks for what good looks like, where models fail and whether a new model is actually better

• Domain-specific AI: turning proprietary pet health data and expert veterinary knowledge into capabilities generic models don’t have

• Multimodal understanding: health records, documents, images and, over time, richer inputs like video

• Safe production AI: working closely with our vets, compliance and engineering teams to make sure the systems we ship are reliable and clinically appropriate

• The next generation of Fetch products: you’ll be deeply involved in product direction and help decide what we should build with AI, not simply implement someone else’s roadmap

• The beginnings of an exceptional AI team: this is a core capability for Fetch and we expect the team around it to grow

You’ll use whatever approach works best.

Sometimes that will mean a frontier closed-source model. Sometimes an open-source model. Sometimes RAG, tools or better context. Sometimes fine-tuning or post-training.

We care about getting to the best result, measuring it properly and improving it quickly.

About you

You’re an exceptional applied AI builder who wants a lot of ownership.

You’ve probably spent the last few years building with modern ML and LLMs and have gone much deeper than plugging an API into a product.

This might look like:

• 3+ years building and shipping ML or AI systems in production

• Strong experience with modern LLMs and applied AI systems

• Deep understanding of evals – how to construct them, measure model quality and use failures to drive improvement

• Experience with post-training, fine-tuning, RAG, structured outputs, tool use or similar techniques

• Strong instincts around training data – what data matters, how to structure it and how to improve its quality

• Enough engineering ability to take an idea from experiment to production

• Good judgement about when to use a frontier model, an open-source model, retrieval, fine-tuning or something simpler

• Strong product thinking – you care what the system enables for the user, not just the benchmark score

• Comfortable working directly with domain experts to turn human expertise into data, evals and model behaviour

Experience in health, veterinary care or insurance is useful. It isn’t required.

A PhD isn’t required either. We care much more about what you’ve built, how you think and how quickly you learn.

You’ll probably love this role if:

• You’re all in on AI and believe it can make the world meaningfully better

• A new model drops and your first instinct is to try it

• You’re optimistic about where the technology is going and curious about what becomes possible next

• You’re empirical – you test things rather than arguing about them in theory

• You move quickly and like turning experiments into real products

• You’re brave enough to try approaches that might fail

• You want a huge amount of influence over product and technical direction

• You want to build the capability yourself before building a team around it

• You like working with very smart people from different disciplines

• You love pets 💗

You probably won’t love this role if:

• You want to spend most of your time managing rather than building

• You need a research paper before you’re comfortable trying something

• You think your job ends when a model works in a notebook

• You’re attached to one model, vendor or technical approach

• You prefer long research cycles over shipping, measuring and iterating

• You need a defined roadmap handed to you

• You want everyone to stay neatly inside their lane

What it’s like here

The Fetch team is ambitious, smart, hard-working, thoughtful and kind.

You’ll work directly with the founders and be involved early in product and company strategy.

We build our own platform and products, so there are very few layers between an idea and something being used in the real world.

You’ll have access to proprietary pet health data, vets and vet nurses who deeply understand the domain, and an engineering team that can help turn models into products.

We use AI constantly ourselves. New tools, models and ideas are there to be tried rather than put through months of approvals.

And you’ll be working on something that matters – eventually helping millions of pets live healthier, happier lives.

Perks

• Competitive Series A salary + meaningful equity

• Hybrid working – 3 days Sydney office, flexible WFH

• Latest MacBook Pro and a top setup

• Unlimited AI tooling – if it helps you build, use it

• Two team retreats each year

• Office dogs for cuddles and interruptions

• Bean-to-cup coffee, unlimited fruit and snacks. Toblerone on tap

• Inclusive parental leave

• 5 weeks annual leave

How to apply

Apply via the link with your CV and anything that shows us how you think and build.

We’d especially like to see:

• The best AI system you’ve built – what it did, what you personally built and why it was hard

• How you evaluated it – what your evals looked like, where the model failed and how you improved it

• Something new in AI that you’re excited about right now – and why

• Links to GitHub, demos, papers, projects or anything else you’re proud of

We use AI tools to help our team review applications. People make the hiring decisions. We handle your personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles, use it only for recruitment, and delete it once the process ends unless you ask us to keep it on file. Questions: support@fetchpet.au.